Remembering the Iconic Entrepreneurs Who Died in 2020

It’s a time for reflection and reverence for those who’ve left indelible marks on independent businesses everywhere

By Leigh Buchanan

Joe Coulombe reimagined grocery shopping as a South Seas voyage. Earl G. Graves Sr. helped millions of Black entrepreneurs realize their dreams. Frieda Caplan made kiwi a household word. Sy Sperling was the founder of the Hair Club for Men — and lest we forget, he was also a client. Here are the notable entrepreneurs we lost in 2020.

Frieda Caplan (January 18, age 96)
Known as “the Kiwi Queen,” Caplan got interested in produce while working for a fruit and vegetable company owned by her husband’s family. She opened a stand at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market in 1962, selling specialty items like spaghetti squash, jicama, and shitake mushrooms. They were salad fixings from Mars, as far as shoppers at the time were concerned: as a marketing gimmick, Caplan even supplied “alien” fruits to the TV series Star Trek. To lessen the shock of the unfamiliar, Caplan packaged her products with cooking information and recipes.

She also rebranded produce that had off-putting names, most famously dubbing the Chinese gooseberry the kiwi and championing its adoption by California growers. Over time Caplan more than quadrupled the variety of options — habaneros and black garlic, Meyer lemons and passion fruit — available in many grocery stores. Frieda’s Inc., the wholesale produce company that grew out of that first stand, was an early proponent of hiring women. Today it has revenues of more than $50 million and employs 75 people.

Leila Janah (January 24, age 37)
“Talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not.” That was the guiding principle for Janah, who by 2019 had helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.

In 2008 she founded Samasource, a business that trains remote workforces in Africa, India, and other developing regions to annotate data for AI projects run by companies like Google and Walmart. A child of Indian immigrants, Janah got the idea for Samasource when she was managing a call center in Mumbai and met a man who commuted there…

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